That idea takes from my mind all bitterness, and leads me only to blame myself.

You will accept this last farewell, and you will bless me for having taken refuge in the inviolable asylum where hatred is extinguished, and where all love endures forever.

Adieu, mademoiselle.
If your happiness could be purchased by the last drop of my blood, I would shed that drop.

I willingly make the sacrifice of it to my misery! "RAOUL, VICOTME DE BRAGELONNE." "The letter reads very well," said the captain.

"I have only one fault to find with it." "Tell me what that is!" said Raoul.
"Why, it is that it tells everything, except the thing which exhales, like a mortal poison from your eyes and from your heart; except the senseless love which still consumes you." Raoul grew paler, but remained silent.
"Why did you not write simply these words: "'MADEMOISELLE,--Instead of cursing you, I love you and I die.'" "That is true," exclaimed Raoul, with a sinister kind of joy.
And tearing the letter he had just taken back, he wrote the following words upon a leaf of his tablets: "To procure the happiness of once more telling you I love you, I commit the baseness of writing to you; and to punish myself for that baseness, I die." And he signed it.
"You will give her these tablets, captain, will you not ?" "When ?" asked the latter.
"On the day," said Bragelonne, pointing to the last sentence, "on the day when you can place a date under these words." And he sprang away quickly to join Athos, who was returning with slow steps.
As they re-entered the fort, the sea rose with that rapid, gusty vehemence which characterizes the Mediterranean; the ill-humor of the element became a tempest.